If all the Lib Dem and Tory MPs who support these contracts were paid for when they turn up to work and not when they have their feet up in the bar or are on holiday, then the country would save £3.7million a year.

It won’t happen, of course, but it serves to illustrate the fact that those who are in favour of zero-hours contracts are those who’ll never have to live with the stress of not knowing your earnings and hours from week to week.

Across Scotland well over 100,000 people are on zero-hours deals and the fall in unemployment is mainly due to people taking up low paid work.

Chancellor George Osborne claims the Coalition have fixed the economy, ignoring that his own cuts strangled growth for years.

And who gets the rewards from recovery built on a housing bubble in the south-east and the low wages of the working poor?

The map we’ve produced of breadline Scotland shows the huge earnings divide right here in Scotland.

Areas like oil-rich Aberdeen and Shetland, the financial centre of Edinburgh and business areas in Glasgow are driving growth.

But other parts of Scotland are in decline and there are pockets of low wage poverty cheek by jowl with some of the most expensive postcodes in the land.

We need all of Scotland to benefit from economic growth.

The SNP are missing the point by saying the biggest problem is the inequality between the whole of Scotland and London – it’s inequality between areas within Scotland that should be troubling them most.

Scotland needs policies, vision and drive to lift all the boats when the economy is rising.

Constitutional wrangles are a distraction when we’re in danger of leaving large parts of the population behind in poverty.

Save the children

CHILDREN as young as 12 are being recruited by Scotland’s organised crime gangs to do their dirty work for them.

What a depressing insight into the way the Mr Bigs of the criminal world think that they are literally beyond control of the law.

Villains are hiring children in care and from the most chaotic family backgrounds to work as drug couriers and vandals in the belief they can operate under the police radar.

And for these children, many of them devoid of any optimism about the future, the world of gangsters and gangsterism seems impossibly glamorous and wealthy.

If we are to end this grim cycle in which the the troubled children of today become the crimelords of tomorrow we need to give them the one thing they haven’t got now: hope.

That is easier said than done, of course.

But as a society, we simply cannot stand by and watch as the most vulnerable children are used as money-making tools by callous drug dealers and gangsters.